San Francisco start-up Posterousannounced an overhaul to its blogging service today, introducing new features designed to make it easier to control who sees your post.

Posterous Spaces, as the new effort is called, represents a change in focus for the three-year old company. The former effort was billed as “the easiest way to share content with friends, family and colleagues,” but struggled to stand out in a world where microblogging platform Tumblr has become one of the fastest-growing sites on the Web. It comes nine months after the company launched Groups, an effort to peel off users from Yahoo Groups and Google Groups.

Spaces retains the core blogging functions of the old site while blending in features from the groups product. (Existing blogs and groups were all converted into spaces this morning.) The result is a platform designed for more intimate kinds of sharing: family members trading vacation photos, book club members discussion this month’s selection, or news about a youth soccer team.

The company decided to make the shift based on data that showed private blogs on the network were growing three times faster than public blogs.

“What we’ve found that really resonates with people is the ability to control what they’re sharing and who they’re sharing with,” said Sachin Agarwal, Posterous’ co-founder and CEO. “Users don’t want to share the same content with everybody. What people love is the idea of creating separate spaces and sharing different content to each of those.”

The idea of more selective sharing — essentially, allowing friends to see your drunken vacation photos while hiding them from your boss — is catching fire in Silicon Valley. Path, a San Francisco photo-sharing start-up, limits the size of a user’s network to 50 friends and family members. Google+, which launched in June, lets users group people into circles like “friends” and “co-workers” and then decide which groups can see each post. Even Facebook, which has pushed users to share more of their lives in public, recently upgraded its privacy controls.

At the same time, Spaces also brings in features that will be familiar to users of Tumblr — a “Reader,” similar to Tumblr’s Dashboard, that shows the latest posts from the blogs you follow; the ability to let users “heart” posts; and a a place to view popular posts on the platform.

Still, Agarwal said, “I think our focus is completely different.” Spaces, he said, is designed to enable the kind of private sharing that to this day still takes place primarily over e-mail.

“With us, we’re really encouraging the idea that you don’t have one feed, that you have many feeds, and that different people exist in each of these different spaces,” he said. “The controlled sharing aspect really sets us apart from most competitors out there.”

Posterous Spaces is free to use. Along with the Web, users can also use the service using new apps for Android and iOS.

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